As I said in a previous message, I believe the comma is required 
regardless of the intended intonation. It's just a punctuation rule. I 
don't think the intonation pattern with the pause and heavy stress on 
the second word is "differential", if what Bill meant by that was 
contrastive. I believe it is for emphasis.

We can't use plural -s as a freestanding word unless it is in the very 
special context of talking about it -- and when we do that, we don't 
pronounce it as a /s/ phoneme in isolation, we use the letter name 
"ess". (As in "The ess on the end of this word indicates plural, 
therefore it does not require an apostrophe.") That is a very special 
context; notice that it is not functioning as a plural marker in that 
case -- it is the name of the suffix, not the suffix itself. In 
repeated modifiers, the words mean what they usually mean in that 
function.

I believe that the doubling of such modifiers is currently still 
syntactic (in other words, not yet reduplication by structural rules), 
but it may be on the way to fixing into such a structure. But again, 
the only evidence I can mount is the fact that it can be repeated 
multiply. I think this multiplying might be viewed as stretching an 
ordinary structure if one were to go beyond, say, four repetitions; at 
a certain point it becomes a joke.

As for all words being able to be nouns when we are citing them as 
language examples, this is a nice demonstration of the fact that the 
form/function difference is crucial to understanding how grammar works. 
Which category a word belongs to and which funcition slots in  can fill 
in sentences are two different matters.

Johanna Rubba, Assoc. Prof., Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
Cal Poly State University
San Luis Obispo, CA 93047
Tel. 805.756.2184
Dept. Tel. 805.756.6374
Home page:
http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba

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